Empfehlungen basierend auf "The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933"

From the New York Times bestselling author of Rules of Civility—a transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotelWith his breakout debut novel, Rules of Civility, Amor Towles established himself as a master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction, bringing late 1930s Manhattan to life with splendid atmosphere and a flawless command of style. Readers and critics were enchanted; as NPR commented, “Towles writes with grace and verve about the mores and manners of a society on the cusp of radical change.”A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in another elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. When, in 1922, he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery.Brimming with humour, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavour to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.

For fans of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the classic Russian novel about an indolent aristocrat who spends most of his days in bedA Penguin ClassicWritten with sympathetic humor and compassion, this masterful portrait of upper-class decline made Ivan Goncharov famous throughout Russia on its publication in 1859. Ilya Ilyich Oblomov is a member of Russia’s dying aristocracy—a man so lazy that he has given up his job in the Civil Service, neglected his books, insulted his friends, and found himself in debt. Too apathetic to do anything about his problems, he lives in a grubby, crumbling apartment, waited on by Zakhar, his equally idle servant. Terrified by the activity necessary to participate in the real world, Oblomov manages to avoid work, postpones change, and—finally—risks losing the love of his life. This superb translation by David Magarshack captures all the subtle comedy and near-tragedy of the original.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Just after the iron curtain fell on Eastern Europe John Steinbeck and acclaimed war photographer, Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the "New York Herald Tribune". This rare opportunity took the famous travelers not only to Moscow and Stalingrad - now Volgograd - but through the countryside of the Ukraine and the Caucasus. A "Russian Journal" is the distillation of their journey and remains a remarkable memoir and unique historical document. Steinbeck and Capa recorded the grim realities of factory workers, government clerks, and peasants, as they emerged from the rubble of World War II. This is an intimate glimpses of two artists at the height of their powers, answering their need to document human struggle.

This volume brings together Gogol's Petersburg Tales with his two most famous plays, all of which guide us through the streets of St. Petersburg, the city erected by force and ingenuity on the marshes of the Neva estuary. Something of the deception and violence of the city's creation seems to lurk beneath its harmonious facade, however, and it confounds its inhabitants with false dreams and absurd visions. This new translation by Christopher English brings out the unique vitality and humor of Russia's finest comic writer.

In a major burst of creativity, Russian poet Alexander Pushkin during just three months in 1830 completed Eugene Onegin, composed more than thirty lyric poems, wrote several short stories and folk tales, and penned the four short dramas in verse that comprise the "little tragedies". The "little tragedies" stand among the great masterpieces of Russian literature, yet they were last translated into English a quarter-century ago, and have in recent years been out of print entirely. In this outstanding new translation, Nancy K. Anderson preserves the cadence and intensity of Pushkin's work while aligning it with today's poetic practices and freer approach to metrics. In addition she provides critical essays examining each play in depth, a discussion of her approach to translating the plays, and a consideration of the genre of these dramatic pieces and their performability.The four "little tragedies" -- Mozart and Salieri, The Miserly Knight, The Stone Guest, and A Feast During the Plague -- are extremely compressed dialogues, each dealing with a dominant protagonist whose central internal conflict determines both the plot and structure of the play. Pushkin focuses on human passions and the interplay between free will and fate: though each protagonist could avoid self-ruin, instead he freely chooses it.

History on a grand scale--an enchanting masterpiece that explores the making of one of the world's most vibrant civilizationsA People's Tragedy, wrote Eric Hobsbawm, did "more to help us understand the Russian Revolution than any other book I know." Now, in Natasha's Dance, internationally renowned historian Orlando Figes does the same for Russian culture, summoning the myriad elements that formed a nation and held it together.Beginning in the eighteenth century with the building of St. Petersburg--a "window on the West"--and culminating with the challenges posed to Russian identity by the Soviet regime, Figes examines how writers, artists, and musicians grappled with the idea of Russia itself--its character, spiritual essence, and destiny. He skillfully interweaves the great works--by Dostoevsky, Stravinsky, and Chagall--with folk embroidery, peasant songs, religious icons, and all the customs of daily life, from food and drink to bathing habits to beliefs about the spirit world. Figes's characters range high and low: the revered Tolstoy, who left his deathbed to search for the Kingdom of God, as well as the serf girl Praskovya, who became Russian opera's first superstar and shocked society by becoming her owner's wife.Like the European-schooled countess Natasha performing an impromptu folk dance in Tolstoy's War and Peace, the spirit of "Russianness" is revealed by Figes as rich and uplifting, complex and contradictory--a powerful force that unified a vast country and proved more lasting than any Russian ruler or state.

Goncharov’s detached yet sympathetic portrait of the humdrum life of his ineffectual and slothful hero is a tragicomedy created through painstaking accumulation of seemingly insignificant details alongside a sympathetic analysis of his character.

Six masterfully executed selections from the famed Russian author's most prolific period display those qualities for which he is famous - a natural aptitude for detail, dialogue, humor, and compassion. Includes 'The Darling', a poignant piece supporting the claim that life has no meaning without love; as well as 'The Kiss', 'Anna on the Neck', 'The Man in a Case', 'The Malefactor', and the title story.

These masterly poems span the decades of Nabokov's career, from 'Music', written in 1914, to the short, playful 'To Vera', composed in 1974. 'The University Poem', one of Nabokov's major poetic works, is here in English for the first time- an extraordinary autobiographical poem looking back at his time at Cambridge, with its dinners, girls and memories, it is suffused with rich description, wit and verbal dexterity. Included too are the surreally comic 'A Literary Dinner', the enchanting, 'Eve', the wryly humorous 'An Evening of Russian Poetry' and a meditation on the act of creation, 'Tolstoy', as well as verse written on America, lepidoptery, sport, love and Nabokov's Russian homeland.

The last Tsaritsa of Russia, Alexandra Fyodorovna, was murdered with her family on the night of 16-17 July 1918 by agents acting on behalf of the revolutionary Bolshevik government. The dramatic story of the demise of the Romanov dynasty has been recounted many times and has captivated the imagination of generations of readers throughout the world. The recently declassified 1918 diary of Alexandra - published here for the first time in its entirety - provides something no other account could do: a glimpse of the Tsaritsa's thoughts and activities from 1 January 1918 until the night of her death. As the granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Alexandra wrote in English, though her native language was German and she became fluent in Russian after her marriage to Nicholas. The 1918 diary takes us into her private world, revealing the care she lavished on her children during this period of revolutionary turmoil, how she felt toward her husband, Tsar Nicholas, and what she imagined about the profound struggle - between past and present, old and new worlds, the sacred and the profane - then occurring over the destiny of Russia. The diary reveals that even in her most intimate reflections, she remained the representative of a great system of belief that had prevailed for hundreds of years in Russia and that she and Nicholas hoped to perpetuate. We see in painful detail the tragic daily confrontation between this system of belief and the reality of the modern world that had, in every sense, broken free of her and Nicholas's control.